page_title: Electrical telegraphy in the United Kingdom
section_title: News service
hierarchical_section_title: Electrical telegraphy in the United Kingdom / Specialist uses / News service
caption_attribution_description: English: Harold Harmsworth.
context_page_description: Electrical telegraphy in the United Kingdom had the world's first commercial telegraph company in the nineteenth century, and British telegraphy dominated international telecommunications until well into the twentieth. Telegraphy is the sending of textual messages by human operators using symbolic codes. Electrical telegraphy sends these messages over conducting wires, often incorporating a telegram service. It is distinct from the optical telegraphy that preceded it and the radiotelegraphy that followed it. Francis Ronalds first demonstrated a working telegraph over a substantial distance in 1816, but was unable to put it into use. Starting in 1836, William Fothergill Cooke, with the scientific assistance of Charles Wheatstone, developed the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph and Cooke formed a company to exploit it. Important components were the needle telegraph instrument suggested by Wheatstone, the battery invented by John Frederic Daniell, and the relay invented by Edward Davy.
  In 1846 the Electric Telegraph Company was formed by Cooke and financier John Lewis Ricardo.
context_section_description: Prior to World War I, the telegraph rates charged to news services became a political issue.  There was an extremely preferential rate granted for news providers.  They were charged one shilling (5p) for 75 or 100 words (depending whether it was inside or out of office hours respectively) and then twopence (0.4p) for each additional 75/100 words, including repeat messages to different addresses.  Thus, a journalist could send 100 messages and 99 of them would cost only twopence.  This was not profitable for the Post Office, but the government was reluctant to act because they did not want to antagonise the newspapers.  The issue was put on hold when war broke out, but in 1915 the minimum price of ordinary inland telegrams was raised from sixpence (2.5p) to ninepence (3.8p).  The Postmaster General, Herbert Samuel, commented "If 6d for 12 words is unremunerative, 1s for 100 words is far more so", let alone the twopence copy rate for subsequent messages.  Samuel proposed a new press scale of 1s for 60/80 words and a copy rate of threepence (1.3p).  This was first delayed to 1917 because of the war, and then to 1920 when it was finally implemented.
  Some London newspaper proprietors, notably Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mirror and cofounder of the Daily Mail, supported increased charges, which would tend to discourage new rivals.  In 1926 Rothermere tried to persuade the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, but the Postmaster General, William Mitchell-Thomson was against charging an economic rate.  Provincial papers would stop using the telegraph, or be driven out of business altogether, with little saving to the Post Office.  The fixed costs of maintaining and operating the telegraph system would still have to be paid.  The press rate was not increased until 1940 when it went up to one shilling and threepence (6.3p) when there was a general increase in all charges.  The copy rate remained at threepence until 1955 when it was abolished.  By that time, with increasing use of the telephone, income from press telegrams had become insignificant.
caption: Lord Rothermere, 1914
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